Who’s Going to Believe You

Chapter 1: The Sound Before the Sting

I heard the slap before I felt it.

That’s the thing nobody tells you. There’s a gap. Half a second where the sound is already out there, bouncing off the courthouse columns and coming back, and your face hasn’t caught up yet.

Then it caught up.

The heat went across my cheek like someone had opened an oven door, and the steps tipped, and the folder I’d been holding against my chest for three weeks wasn’t against my chest anymore. It was in the air. Then it was on the stone, open, and the pages went down the steps one at a time the way leaves go down a river.

My hand went to the underside of my belly before it went anywhere else. I didn’t decide that. It just went.

Seven months. Thirty weeks and two days, if you want it exact, and I did want it exact, because exact was the only thing I’d had for a long time.

“Pick those up,” Grant said.

He didn’t shout it. He never shouted in public. He said it the way you tell a dog to sit, low and bored, and then he reached up and ran two fingers down the length of his tie, from the knot to the tip, and smoothed it flat.

I knew that gesture. I’d learned it the way you learn where the loose board is on a staircase.

Nobody on the steps moved.

There were maybe fifteen people out there at ten to nine on a Tuesday. Two men with briefcases halfway up. A woman in scrubs with a paper bag of something that smelled like bacon. A kid in a courier vest with a package under his arm. A man in a short-sleeved shirt right by the glass doors, close enough that I could see the pen clipped in his pocket.

And one step below Grant, a small grey-haired woman holding a coffee cup, who hadn’t moved at all.

I had noticed her when we came up the steps. I notice shoes. It’s a habit from a job I used to have, when I sat at a desk by a door all day and saw more shoes than faces. Hers were flat and brown and the left toe was scuffed pale, like she walked a long way in them every morning. There was a half-moon of lipstick on the lid of her cup. Her reading glasses were pushed up into her hair and forgotten there.

She looked like a clerk. She looked like somebody’s aunt.

She was looking at my pages.

I got down.

Getting down is a project at seven months. You don’t bend. You go sideways, one hand on something, and you lower yourself the way you’d lower a box you weren’t sure about. I put my hand on the brass rail that ran down the middle of the steps and it was already warm from the sun, and I went down onto one knee, and the stone came through the knit of my dress like it had been waiting for me.

The first page was the cover sheet. My name was on it. My real name, the one before his. Petition of Lena Cole Whitlock. I’d read that line so many times that the edge of the paper had opened up a thin cut on my right thumb, and the cut had opened again on the drive over, and now there was a small red smear next to the word Petition.

I pressed my thumb into my palm. I do that. It’s stupid. It doesn’t help.

Second page. Third.

The fourth page was under his shoe.

He hadn’t stepped on it by accident. His shoe was square on it, polished black, the laces tied in the double knot his father had taught him, and he leaned his weight forward onto it so I could hear the paper give under the sole. A dry little sound. Like a bug.

“Grant, please,” I said. “People are watching.”

I said it to his shoe. I couldn’t get my eyes any higher than that.

“Good,” he said, and this time he said it to the steps, to all of them, in the warm loud voice he used at the Rotary breakfasts. “Let them see you crawl.”

One of the men with briefcases found something very interesting on his phone. Then the other one did.

That was the thing about Grant. He didn’t need people to be on his side. He just needed them to look at their phones, and people are very good at that. I had watched it happen in restaurants and in church parking lots and once, memorably, in the waiting room of my own dentist. He said a thing in that voice, and the room decided it hadn’t heard it.

I stayed on my knee with three pages against my chest and looked at the fourth one under his shoe, and I thought about the flour tin.

* * *

The notice had come on a Thursday. I knew it would, because I’d called the clerk’s office to ask. I’d called from Mrs. Pruitt’s kitchen next door, standing by her stove with the long beige cord of her wall phone wrapped twice around my wrist, while she pretended to water a plant that was already dead.

Mrs. Pruitt was seventy-four. She had a station wagon the color of a paper bag and she drove it with both hands at ten and two. She had never once asked me why I came over to use her phone instead of my own.

She knew why. Everyone on Juniper Lane knew why. They just had the manners not to say it.

“You want me to drive you?” she’d said, when I hung up. She was still holding the watering can.

“You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t have to. I’m seventy-four years old, Lena. I don’t have to do anything.” She put the can down. “Tuesday. What time does he leave?”

“Seven forty.”

“Then you’ll be in my car at seven forty-five, and we won’t talk about it again until then, because you’ve got a face like a window and he’ll read it.”

So we didn’t talk about it. For three weeks I went over on Tuesdays and Thursdays and sat in her kitchen and drank her terrible coffee and we talked about her tomatoes, and every time I left she said, “Tuesday,” like it was a word for goodbye.

My own phone was a nice phone. It had a nice case. It also had an app on it that Grant had put there the first month we were married, “so I’d know you got home safe,” and the app told him where the phone was, and the phone told him who I’d called. I’d found that out the way I found out most things in that house. By being punished for something I hadn’t known was a crime.

So. Mrs. Pruitt’s kitchen. The clerk’s voice, bored and kind.

“Tuesday the twenty-sixth, nine a.m., Judge Hale, Room 2B. You’ll get a notice in the mail, ma’am.”

“Is there any way to not get it in the mail?”

A pause. The kind of pause a person makes when they’ve heard a question like that before.

“You can pick up a copy at the window, ma’am. Second floor. Bring your identification.”

I couldn’t get to the second floor. I couldn’t get to the first floor. I could get to Mrs. Pruitt’s kitchen on Tuesdays and Thursdays between ten and eleven, when Grant was in his standing meeting and the app on my phone showed me sitting in my own living room, because that’s where I’d left it, on the arm of the couch, face down.

“The mail is fine,” I said. “Thank you.”

In the mail. Our mail went to a box at the end of the drive, and Grant collected it on his way in from work, and he opened all of it at the kitchen island with a letter opener shaped like a heron. I’d watched him open a birthday card from my mother that way, the year before she died. He’d read it before he handed it to me.

So I’d done the only thing I could think of. I’d walked down to the box at two in the afternoon every day for a week, in the heat, with my hand under my belly, and on the fifth day the envelope was there, and I’d carried it into the house inside my dress, and I’d put it in the flour tin.

Grant did not cook. Grant had never, in three years, opened the flour tin.

I’d taken it out every night when he was in the shower and read it and put it back. That was how my thumb got cut. On the staple.

* * *

“I said pick it up.”

I came back to the steps. Grant was looking down at me with an expression I’d have called patient, if I hadn’t known him.

I reached for the page under his shoe.

He let my fingers get close enough to touch the edge of it. Then he lifted his foot and brought it down on my hand.

Not hard. Not hard enough to break anything. Just enough weight for exactly one second, so that I felt every grain of grit on the stone go into the back of my hand, and then he took the foot away and the page with it, and bent, and picked the page up himself.

He read it.

I watched him read it. His eyes moved and his face didn’t. He got to the bottom of the page and his jaw did a thing, a small sideways shift, like he was moving a seed from one side of his mouth to the other.

Then he folded the page in half and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket.

“Up,” he said.

“Grant—”

“Up.” He got his hand under my elbow and lifted, and I came up off my knee faster than my body wanted to, and the three pages I’d been holding slid out from under my arm and went down the steps again, and this time I let them go.

His hand on my elbow was warm and dry and absolutely steady. His father’s watch was on that wrist. Steel band, plain face, forty years old. He checked it. Right then, with his other hand full of my arm and my papers all over a public staircase, he turned his wrist and checked the time, and I understood he was deciding whether we were going to be late for the thing he’d planned for this morning instead.

“Nothing on those pages is yours,” he said, close to my ear.

“They’re mine.” It came out of me before I knew it was coming. “My name is on them.”

He stopped walking.

I had not spoken back to him in a public place in two years and nine months. I know the number because the last time was at his cousin’s wedding, when I’d said no thank you to a second glass of wine he’d poured for me in front of a table, and we’d driven home in a silence so complete I could hear the tires change pitch on the bridge.

He turned his head and looked at me. The smile was still on his face. It was always on his face. It just stopped a little lower than it usually did.

“Your name,” he said, “is on a lot of things.”

I didn’t understand that then. I thought he meant the house, his house, the one on Fairmont with the gates that I had never once opened myself. I thought he meant the joint account I couldn’t see. I thought he was reminding me how much of me belonged to him.

I didn’t think about my mother’s house. The small yellow one on Juniper Lane, two doors down from Mrs. Pruitt, with the porch that needed paint. Mine since the day she died, two years and four months ago, on a Wednesday afternoon while I sat in a dentist’s waiting room because Grant had told me the hospital said there was no hurry.

I didn’t think about that house at all.

I would.

* * *

Here is what the people on the steps saw, if any of them had been looking instead of at their phones. A tall man in a good suit walking his pregnant wife down the courthouse steps with his hand on her elbow, the way you’d help someone who’d had a dizzy spell. Papers on the ground. A little drama. Nothing you’d want to get involved in.

Here is what it was. He was walking me to the car.

The car was at the curb on the far side of the street, a silver sedan with the engine still running, because he’d known this would take two minutes. He’d pulled up as Mrs. Pruitt was pulling away. I’d been three steps from the top. I had been three steps from the glass doors and the metal detector and a deputy with a soft voice who would have asked me what I was there for, and I would have said Room 2B, and that would have been the end of three years.

He’d come up the steps two at a time with his hand already out and his smile already on.

“There you are,” he’d said, loud, for the steps. “Honey. You scared me.”

I’d turned around. I’d actually turned around, three steps from the door, because three years is a long time and the body learns.

“How did you—”

“Mrs. Pruitt’s car,” he’d said, pleasantly, “has a very distinctive sound.”

And then, quieter, with his hand closing on the folder: “We talked about this.”

“We didn’t,” I’d said. “We never—”

“Honey.” Still smiling. Still loud enough for the steps. “You’re not well. Come on.”

We had not talked about this. We had never talked about anything. Talking was a thing Grant did to a room.

Four steps down now. Five. The street getting closer, the engine idling across it. My feet going where his hand told them to go, because that’s what three years does to feet.

And then I saw her move.

The small woman with the coffee. She had been one step below us when we started down, which meant she was now one step above, and she had not stepped aside, and she had not looked at her phone. She bent at the knees, not the waist, the way people do who’ve been told to by a doctor, and she picked up the page he’d torn under his shoe, and she straightened up with it.

She pulled her glasses down out of her hair and read it.

I don’t know how long she read it. It felt long. It was probably four seconds. The glass doors sighed open behind her and the man with the pen in his pocket went through them, and she didn’t look up.

Then she set her coffee cup down on the stone ledge beside the rail. Carefully. Lid up. Like she expected to come back for it.

Grant hadn’t seen any of this. Grant was looking at the street.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he said to me, conversationally. “You’re going to get in the car. We’re going to drive home. You’re going to lie down, because you look terrible, and you clearly haven’t been sleeping, and that’s not good for anyone. And whatever this was”—a small wave of his free hand at the steps, the pages, me—”this is going to be the morning you had a bit of a turn outside the courthouse. People saw it. People will remember it that way.”

He said it so reasonably. That was always the worst part. He’d have made a wonderful doctor.

“I’m not getting in the car,” I said.

“Of course you are.”

“Grant. I’m not—”

“Lena.” He squeezed my elbow, once, the way you’d squeeze a hand at a funeral. “Look around you.”

“And if anyone asks,” he went on, “if anyone ever asks about any of this—”

He stopped on the step and turned, and he lifted his free arm out toward all of them. The briefcases. The scrubs. The courier. The whole hot white staircase and everyone on it, like a man about to lead a toast.

“Who’s going to believe you?” he said. “Anyone?”

And he waited.

He actually waited. He let the question sit out there in the sun with his arm up, and he turned his head slowly along the steps, and he smiled at each of them, and one by one they found their phones, and their shoes, and the door. The woman in scrubs looked at her bacon. The courier looked at his package like he’d never seen one before.

Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.

The traffic went on behind us. Somewhere down the block a bus knelt at its stop with a long hydraulic sigh, and across the street his car sat idling with the air conditioning on, waiting for me the way it always had.

I stood there with his hand on my elbow and the sting finally gone out of my cheek and nothing but heat left, and I thought: this is the answer. This has always been the answer. I’ve been standing in a room full of people for three years asking this question in my head, and this is the answer, and I knew it, and I came anyway.

I looked down at my thumb. The cut had opened again. There was a thin red line of it in the crease of my palm.

Then somebody stepped up beside me.

I smelled coffee and something plain, like soap. A small hand came into my eyeline holding the torn page, folded once, and pressed it against my fingers until they closed on it. The hand had a wedding band on it and nothing else. The nails were short and clean and unpainted.

She was a head shorter than Grant. She had to look up at him. She did it over the top of her glasses, which had slid down to the end of her nose, and she looked at him the way you’d look at a form someone had filled in wrong.

Grant’s arm was still up.

She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to.

“I will. I’m the judge.”